Nick: Sorry for the lateness of the blog this morning, but we have had a pretty poor week with bad colds/flu (and me working nightshift), Lorraine has to babysit her grandchildren, and what with one of our tropical fish about to snuff it, the crossword blog got overlooked on Friday/Saturday – anyway, here we are.

This was a fairly typical plain Azed where the parsing is clear after a little bit of thought. I normally find the surfaces of Azed’s clues to be very smooth, but I did wonder about the surface of some the early Across clues in this puzzle.